Good Practice Recommendations - Safety, Harassment and Discrimination
- Disablist crime should be monitored by the police.
- Information on homophobic and disablist crime should be made available in a number of formats, to encourage LGB disabled people to report hate crime, raise people’s expectations of the service that they should receive and to explain how to complain if the police do not respond adequately.
- Support services, such as Victim Support, should look at their services in order to provide support to LGB disabled people.
- Police and other services need to ensure that crime such as verbal abuse is taken seriously and that it is not regarded as “low-level” anti social behaviour, because of the impact it has on the mental health and freedom of LGB disabled people.
- There needs to be more work to ensure that disabled people have adequate redress and protection against hate crime perpetrated by people that are supposed to be providing a service, such as “care workers”.
- Police need to continue work to respond in a consistent manner to hate crime, wherever it occurs. This includes training of police officers and support staff in equality issues and consistent implementation of national and West Yorkshire-wide policies.
- Independent reporting centres need to understand both homophobic and disablist hate crime in order to provide an alternative monitoring method to reporting to the police.
- More organisations, services and venues taking up an “LGB friendly” charter mark (see general recommendations) would increase feelings of safety and confidence amongst LGB disabled people.
- Services should have their Equality Policies, Harassment Policies and complaints procedures advertised widely in their public areas, Services should have full copies of these policies easily available for service users to obtain their own copy on request.
- The existence and use of policies to prevent harassment and discrimination of LGB disabled people should be monitored both locally (e.g. by Leeds City Council when awarding contracts to the voluntary or private sector) and nationally (eg as part of Commission for Social Care Inspection regulated inspections of care services).
